5 Top Benefits Of Taking Your Small Or Home Business Online With A Website

5 Top Benefits Of Taking Your Local, Small Home Business To The Internet (Online) With A Website

Have you ever wondered aloud “is it worth it to have a website or blog?” or “what is the benefit of having a website for my small business?” You’re not alone. You’ll discover the answers to why any business should have a website or blog, no matter what they sell and no matter whether it’s a home business or small brick and mortar business.

This post is the final of a two-part series on why any small brick-and-mortar or home business should start taking their business to the internet.

Let me ask you a question. Would you rather walk on foot, ride a bicycle or drive a car from point 0 to the next 100km destination? Would you rather fill a 50 litres water storage tank using spoons or running tap?

Internet  businesses and offline businesses can be illustrated by the trekking and driving from point zero to 100km. With the same efforts, you can gain over 100 times more customers and sales within the same period, through a business that is run on the internet than an offline business.

High efficiency and high output are the advantages of doing business on the internet (online). With just a few free hours a day and limited budget, you can now achieve nearly the same results online as full time business owners.

Taking your business to the internet (aka online) is no longer an option. You can do it now or risk facing a slow death!

Why do I say this? Many people are now buying majority of their goods and service through the internet  – your customers are gradually replacing you. You can either follow them to keep them or lose them for good.

Having a website can help ANY business to significantly shoot up sales and profit with minimal time, efforts and money inputs. This post will highlight the opportunities you are missing if you do not have a website, and also let you know that it is not a techie affair. So let’s quickly delve in.

Top Advantages and Justification For Small Home Businesses To Take Their Business To The Internet

Below are the major advantages the internet offers for small and home business start-ups who have limited time, efforts and money to start taking their business online (to the internet).

1. Maximum, repeated exposure of your offers to subscribers, at no ad costs:

You need to have a list of people to tell about your business. Remember they say, write a list of 100 friends and family – they are your warm (may buy) list.  You can only make a significant income from lots of sales. How many people can you possibly talk to, face to face, to make that happen? If you only expose your offers to your friends and family, it means that as soon as you have finished talking to all of them and making a few sales (if you are lucky), your business would come to an end. However, with an online business, you do not need to chase or force anyone to buy from you; they will find you and come to you. People who are ready and willing to buy, with cash in hand, search the internet for and land on websites that have information that could help them make buying decisions, and they buy from those websites.

With your business presence on the internet (online), you can offer target customers and website visitors useful information packed in a small report, in exchange for their contact details so that you can expose your offers to them repeatedly via emails, without paying advertising costs. That is the way sales are made online, and that is how one time customers are turned to repeat buyers.

2. Expert Branding to Attract More Customers

People love to be associated with popular brands, offline and online. With your business presence on the internet, you can brand yourself as a solutions provider to your target market using your website – your “About Me” page lets people know more about you and how you are qualified to help them; your contents speak about what you know and carry emotions of you as passionate to help guide, educate and provide solutions to others while establishing you as a that trusted “go-to-person” in the eyes of your readers.

With more exposure to your contents via your website and emails, your target customers get to know and trust you enough to buy from you whenever they are ready.

3. Free, Viral Marketing all year round

Your website is a permanent placement for your contents, which pre-sell for you. Your contents on the internet are not erased – they continue to work for you 24 hours daily, all year round.

People love sharing what they benefited from and they can freely share your eBooks and blog posts to their friends. This can happen if you give away free quality reports to your readers on your blog, and if you tweet your blog posts or share it on Facebook. That is how your contents, and You Inc. brand can go viral and you can gain massive new readers and subscribers at no cost to you.

Imagine if 10 people shared your blog post on Facebook and each of those 10 shared to another 10 Facebook friends and those 10 shared to another 10 – that is 1000 shares. Imagine again if all those 1000 visited your blog – you have gained 1000 new visitors free, advertised by others.

Some of these new visitors may become your subscribers, and may buy from you at some point. Do you see how you can work less and earn more? Leverage on the internet – No phone call costs, no TV/ radio advert costs, no repeated flyer / biz card printing costs.

4. More Sales via automated customer follow up creating

Generally, people do not buy the first time they are exposed to a product or service – even when they know they need it, and can afford it. They usually want to find out more about the product first, and only buy when they get enough information or education about it.

You do not need to do this yourself. You only need to set your follow up messages once in your autoresponder and schedule it to automatically send follow up information to your target customers. This way, you allow your customers time to make buying decisions, while educating them, so that they buy from you when they get enough information from your autoresponder messages.

Imagine what you could be doing with your free time while your business is running on autopilot? You could be taking a vacation, doing other money-making business – many possibilities. On the other hand, an offline business would be spending money on fliers, phone calls, business cards, commuting to visit people for business presentations or pitching.

With an autoresponder, you can email 5000 or any number of people you want any number of times at anytime of day, telling them about your business etc.

5. Increase your market reach

With your business on the internet, you can attract more customers from several media such as:

• Internet searches e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing
• Articles you post on directories and other blogs;
• Forums in your market or niche;
• Social Media networks such as Facebook, Twitter;
• Social bookmarks sites such as Diggs, stumbleupon, delicious

You will be able to reach more people (and make more sales) than you possibly could offline, because additionally people would you through word of mouth recommendations and retweets by their friends. More reach equals exposure, more sales and more money.

Overall, businesses (buying and selling plus getting new customers) done on the internet are more efficient and more productive. Internet business operations require less start-up cost, zero overhead cost, Less Running Cost, Limited human resource; generates way more sales – 1 man can generate monthly sales & income of 10 man businesses. It is as easy as sending an email… no technicalities involved.

Finally, the level of success you can get from taking your business to the internet (online) is immense, and you can save you time and efforts, working less time leveraging on your website and autoresponders. Whatever business you are doing offline, face-to-face can be done on the internet (mix it – online and offline but not offline alone) if you want to make more sales. You can make over 10 times from what you currently make monthly offline.

It’s so easy, almost every small and home business now has a blog or website…

To get your own website in the next 24 hours, click here to follow this step by step website creation process I wrote for you. It’s easy.

Mom-and-pop shops do have ‘em, home businesses do have ‘em, stay-at-home-parents who have their home businesses do have ‘em, college students working from home do have ‘em, baby boomers and seniors working from home do have ‘em and it is working for them. Whatever business you are in, you should consider setting a presence for your business on the internet (online) and be found by more people looking for what you sell. It can work for you too.

If you are reading this post, are in a small offline or home business or thinking of starting one, but do not have a website or blog, you should consider getting one. It’s all now plug and play and if you can click a mouse, you can setup your website by yourself using available ready-made platforms and designs.

Note that creating a website for any small or home business is very cheap – less than $10 monthly is all the expenses you need to have your website started if you learn to do it yourself (it’s not a techy thing) else you can hire freelancers at $5 per task at Fiverr to set your website up for you.

Next Steps…

Have you been putting off the idea of taking a step to taking your business to the internet (online) because you think it’s a techie thing? I assure you that it’s not – I used to think the same way too, and if I knew what I know now, I would have started my blog earlier.

With just a few free hours a day and limited budget, you can now achieve nearly the same results on the internet (online) as full time business owners.

I’d love to hear your ideas, questions or comments.

If you liked this post, please help others benefit from it. Like, Share it on Facebook, Tweet it, Stumble it, Digg it…

Thanks for reading. I’ll meet you at the comments side.

Stella

 

Related Readings:

• How to setup a new WordPress blog/ website for your business
• Top 5 Reasons Why Having a Website is No Longer an Option for Any Serious Business